Products of all kinds are conveyed on a belt or other drive during processing. When many of the products are similarly or identically shaped, it is common to stack the products prior to packaging, so that many products may be packaged together. Stacking is also needed as a manner of counting identically shaped products, and grouping a certain number of products together before further processing.
In existing product processing procedures, operators are required to accumulate and count products that arrive at the operators' positions, one by one on a product delivery conveyor. Operators were then required to move the desired accumulated quantity to a location where shipping case loading could then be performed. Such a procedure expends valuable man hours and can be very tiring for operators.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to allow for automatic accumulation of products from a conveyor in a desired quantity, and release the accumulated products onto that same conveyor. It is a further object of the present invention to receive and release the products when they are stacked at a certain elevation. It is yet another object of the invention to provide an apparatus that accomplishes the above functions that is easily attached and removed from a conveyor.